Post Mortem
by PsychoDirector
Summary: PrePP. There's a dead boy in denial and a billionaire with years of skeletons. Both will have to cope with their mortality in order to defeat the one 'true' hybrid... and their own inner demons. Has character death and canon rape; full description inside.


_Summary: "Come now, Daniel, a failed invention of your parents' gave you superpowers and amazing ghost genes? You don't believe any of that was real, did you?"_

_Vlad and Danny are forced to team up in order to stop a ghost claiming to be the world's only 'true' halfa, and an inventor growing wealthy off stolen Fenton inventions. However, Vlad has a secret, and it involves the bodies of a billionaire and a boy in a white HAZMAT suit left adrift in the Ghost Zone, and a few syringes of ectoplasm. Face to face with his own death, Danny has to wonder if there's something more going on, or if the 'halfa' is right, and they're nothing better than ghosts in denial. Critique always welcome, pairings undecided. _

_And, to my past readers, I'm sorry I left you hanging for so long. See the bottom for the TL;DR version of my apology. For now, it's ficcy-time._

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"Ah, what a beautiful morning it is!"

The snow made a sound like snapping bird bones as a pair of polished black boots alighted upon them, shattering into increasing fragments as if it were made of glass. Above them, a black-haired figure let out a sadistic guffaw of a laugh, then sprung back into the air, catching on it like a bug on a windshield before letting loose another steaming blast of purplish energy. With an indignant squawk, a drifting ribbon of green ectoplasm was rendered into little more than gooey droplets, which faded sadly into the gloomy background.

"Peace and quiet…"

Whooping laughter and the roar of an overworked engine plowed through the air, and the rocks that made up what passed for ground in the Ghost Zone rattled in their places as Johnny 13 and Girlfriend of the Week powered a glistening green path through space. Distant ghosts howled in lunatic rage and pain, and just a few yards above, a Yiddish vulture snapped angrily at the dead teens to turn off their 'noise machine'. Finally, to complete the soundtrack of unlife, the terrified baying of a deer ghost and the maniac laughter of a robotic-suited hunter in pursuit echoed from a thick stretch of deformed forest below.

"Gorgeous scenery…"

The white-caped figure swept between large chunks of rock floating in an endless, sickly-colored abyss, passing by looming castles, frosty plains, tunnels lined with teeth, and all other scenes of typical Halloween horror.

"And best of all," Vladimir Plasmious pronounced, drifting gleefully towards what appeared to be a series of navy blue caverns carved in a rock like an asteroid, "no selfish, meddling, do-goody ghost child or simpleton sidekicks to ruin the moment!"

For once, his monologue went un-ironically-answered, and he glided through one of the many wormhole entrances without contradiction. His spiked horns of hair billowed in a gentle puff of breeze, and a sinking sensation that would have meant humid warmth as Masters but was then only a distant gnawing passed through him. He looked upon the stalactites and stalagmites that decorated the sides (if a circle can be said to have sides) of the cave with familiar disdain. To the untrained eye, this would have seemed no different than the other caverns, but Vlad was devilishly clever, and had left himself a small sign by which to find this one by.

…Which is to say that he hung a green and gold football helmet from one of the stalagmites near the entrance.

As the spectral billionaire traveled deeper into the rock, holding out a glowing purple palm to light his way, the bland, stony appearance of the place began to subtly change. A femur could be found here, a ribcage half-buried over there, a skull with a few white strands of hair still clinging to it down yonder. Scraps of clothes, mostly white or tacky neon orange but occasionally dotted with rocket ship designs and pink lace, covered some remains. Most, however, were rotted to nearly nothing.

"Then again, I suppose I should could my blessings on _that_ one," Vlad noted, gazing warily at a skull no longer than his hand. The skeleton body below it was swathed in pastel blue pajamas, decorated with empty-eyed teddy bears.

Slowly, Vlad drifted to a halt, bouncing steadily on the air as he looked about. It was here, he knew that much, beside the yellow dress and the bone hand frozen in an ironic thumbs-up. He hadn't been able to disturb it, afraid that it would turn to dust in his hands—or worse, affirm itself as real, and push forward a reality he simply couldn't bring himself to accept, even after fifteen years of pondering it.

"Ah, yes, my boy, I hadn't forgotten about you," Vlad murmured as he approached, coming to land on the dust-strewn floor and clipping neatly across it. "It's been a while. I've been keeping myself busy, you know how it is. Mayoral duties, world domination, battling my arch rival, feeding Maddy Junior, you understand." The yellow dress approached, smelling of faint decay and mold. Vlad wrinkled his nose, then turned to the hand, continuing forward.

"It really is a shame. You had such potential, so much to do. So much left undone." For a moment, Vlad's voice dipped from its usual brash tones, growing strangely quiet and regretful. He passed the hand, approaching a spot near the end wall of the cavern. The light from his powers cast odd shadows upon this back wall, reflecting against a massive pile of corpses in varying states of corrosion. Strangers piled against strangers, all in a piecemeal, many-limbed mass that rank of death. Vlad neared this, eyes alight with a distant purple glow and expression both intense and regretful.

Suddenly, just when Vlad seemed to be at the threshold of whatever treasure he sought amongst the dead, a rattling reverberation shot through and pounded his body. He whipped around, cape slapping his ankles and corpse mound once again cast into shadow as the shock wave faded. Red eyes darted suspiciously about the area, taking in bodies that in many places had been stirred to dust with lightning glimpses. A voice that echoed as unnerved as he felt barked out towards the entrance, forceful only through practice—not will.

"Who did that? Show yourself!" Only silence greeted him. Even the ghosts outside seemed to have gone quiet, their folly interrupted along with Vlad's mission. Growling in frustration, the ghost leapt into the air again, spiraling through the tunnel to catch whatever had dared interrupt this long-postponed meeting.

"I swear, if it's another of those filthy lesser specters, I'll take it by its throat and shove my boot directly up its ectoplasmic—" That was as far as he got. He shot through the cavern like a cannonball, whipping around, hissing out venomous curses, and trying to find the vibration's source before it could escape, and then spied it. It didn't take long—he merely had to look just above the spot he'd been shaken at, and his eyes immediately caught upon a small figure pressed flat against the rock.

A small figure with a familiar black hairdo and an unfamiliar white and black bodysuit. It didn't look like nearly enough to make the enormous rock so much as shiver, but the shockwaves of the impact had nevertheless echoed and grown as they worked their way through the hollow caves, until it hit Vlad in loud glory.

A butterfly flaps its wings, and across the world, a hurricane blows.

"Well, if it isn't young Daniel Fenton. What a surprise," Vlad smirked, dancing over to the limp figure. "Sleeping on the job, are we? Now, now, that's not true heroics, my boy. We wouldn't want to give off a bad impression." Danny said nothing, face pressed against the rock and body still as the grave. Upon closer inspection, Vlad could see a growing stain of blood making its way across the rock from under the boy's t-shirt. He held his arms behind his back, leaning closer and biting his lip thoughtfully, as if he were just reading a mildly interesting plaque.

"Hmm, you look like you could use a spot of help. Someone would have to be completely without morality to overlook such a circumstance brought upon Amity Park's greatest hero." He smirked, then, and raised his foot back, meaning to strike it against his rival's limp form and take full advantage of a moment of random, pleasant weakness. However, before it could hope to connect, he paused, looking closer at the aura of red-stained rock that surrounded the boy. As he watched, the aura spread at a rather startling rate, pooling eagerly out of a sunken torso and green-tinted arms.

Shaking for reasons he couldn't quite explain, Vlad crouched down beside his foe, thoughts of sadistic vengeance outweighed by a more pressing… concern.

"Daniel?"

The blood was getting a little too thick, the body too still. He'd expected a groan of pain by now, an unexpected (but certainly earned, if he may say so himself) treat to his bitter rival staring up at him with shocked, agonized eyes. He'd expected icy resistance, tired witty banter, the same as usual, but with a moment of satisfaction where he had Danny Fenton somehow set down on his knees before him. He'd expected a brief moment of triumph before the sudden victory was taken away again and reality reasserted itself, and the daring hero escaped once again, bruised, but alive and happy. It was the role of the villain to lose by a hair, but for both to leave well enough to return for another go, and so on and so forth until they grew bored of the game. It was a happy little game of heroics, after all, and they were the only key players.

"Little badger?" No insulting formalities now. Vlad was at once the opposite player in their metaphorical trade and what he really was, the godfather to a boy he'd grown to admire like a son through their developing play. In this game, as far as Vlad knew, there was only one person who could ever come close to killing Danny, and that was himself. The idea that something had beaten him to it was simply unthinkable. They'd bounced so much off each other as they grew—they were mortal enemies, and the only creature that can kill a mortal enemy is another mortal enemy. Not a random instance. Not possible.

But yet, as he turned the boy's body gently onto its back, mindful of the blood that spilled from the various gashes torn by the thick, rough rock, he realized that the rules had been broken. Empty blue eyes stared heavenward from sunken sockets, pale face patterned with the blue and red lines of clotted veins. This was a body that had been dead for some time, tossed into the Ghost Zone in the same way one might throw a used wrapper out a car window.

"_Little badger_?" The child was unresponsive, of course, but Vlad nevertheless shook him roughly, godfather and arch enemy ideals agreeing on one thing alone—he could be electrocuted, burned, beaten, strangled, and thrown from the highest tower, but Danny simply could not die. He was immortal and so was Vlad, and that was the way things simply _were_.

Vlad cursed under his breath, reaching for a gloved wrist to find a pulse he knew wouldn't be there. Before he could reach it, the arm broke off in his grip, yellowed bone gliding cleanly free from greenish tendons. The billionaire let out a yelp of surprise, flinging the offending limb away from himself and jumping away from the body in one fluid motion. He glided smoothly outwards, powered by the lack of Zone gravity, then turned, scowling, heavenwards. He looked around, wildly, and fired a sparking blast of energy at a passing lesser phantom. It disintegrated effortlessly.

"Foolish, insolent specters! I did not ask you to do my job for me! That boy was mine to toy with, you understand? I was the only one allowed to kill him!" He was speaking irrationally, he knew, to nothing within sight, but it was hard to stop. He _felt _irrational, felt cheated and shown up and deprived of one of the only three things that had given his life meaning since that dreadful accident. The Packers couldn't be bought and Maddie was infatuated with that idiot Fenton—he would _not_ be cheated out of the last craving his riches had been unable to satisfy! He howled in rage, slamming his fists together and letting loose a thick beam of pure energy. It struck nothing more than a passing, shapeless ghost or two, and as it dispersed into space, Vlad was left winded and drained.

The billionaire sighed, then, a long, deep noise that moved his whole body to sag with it. A ring of white appeared around his midsection and quietly divided, moving upwards and downwards until a white haired, suited gentleman stood in place of the vampiric ghost. He came to stand next to the corpse, the only living human on a rock full of bodies in a land full of spirits.

"Now, now, Masters, mustn't lose our head, here. Think this through." He looked, somewhat unwillingly, back to the body, pressing an icy hand to his own forehead.

Upon closer inspection, Vlad recognized the white suit—it was an exact inversion of the boy's little 'superhero' costume. He also noted the decay and rot that had crept up on the body like a slow tide, building up over a period that he pinpointed as almost a year and not even close to two days. No, this was a body that had been floating in the Ghost Zone for a long, long time, a very good while before his last meeting with the decidedly-alive Danny Phantom.

Either Daniel had a very convincing twin, or…

"Of course." Vlad let out a tired sigh, turning his gaze towards the rock. "I see. I was hoping things would be different this time." He glanced back at the body, which stared at nothing with horrified and pained, half-rotten eyeballs, and shivered.

"It would seem the Fentons are deserving of a visit." And with that, he lifted off the ground again, leaving the body behind and sailing through the Ghost Zone, hunting for the oblivious ghost-hunting family.

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_...Okay, so lame intro was lame, but whatever. Sorry for any confusion; I promise it'll all make sense later, even though many of you have probably already caught on. I apologize if this plot has been done before, which is more than likely, but I'm too lazy to read through 9,000+ fics to check, so there. If not, yay storytime. If so, well, enjoy the PsychoDirector take. And now, for those of you who;ve been waiting patiently, I express my apology._

**_In the immortal words of the main protagonist of this fandom, 'guess who's back'. -Ducks a rain of rocks, fruit, and other throwing objects- Okay, okay! So it's been a while. A long, long while. A long, long while that initiated with little notice and proceeded for months on end, leading readers' comments unanswered and everyone who doesn't frequent my DA wondering if I died. I know it was all my fault; it was selfish and irresponsible of me and I promise to at least leave a little note if I decide to go on a magical adventure to find myself again. I wish I had an excuse that was good enough to justify or at least alleviate the sudden deathdom, unexpectedly shocked back to life in yet ANOTHER new fanfic (...-sigh-), such as my mom's cousin's aunt's brother's grandson dying of Gonnesyphaherpeaids or getting abducted by aliens, but the truth is that it was nothing more complex than I was writing real fiction and living the real life._**

**_Pathetic as it may sound, I have a confidence level the size of a grape. Like one of those shriveled, unripe, half-raisin grapes that you find in the middle of the bushel, surrounded by other, roundier grapes. A good friend of mine recommended turning my writing towards online contests, and after much hemming and hawing, I eventually agreed to give it a try, figuring I'd be out by round one and back to fanfics like nothing happened, because that's the way life is. Well, to make a long story short, I'm still in it to this day, and finally began to realize that maybe my scribbles weren't just limited to fanfics (duh, I know). I immediately went into 'AHM SPECHUL' mode, and proceeded to dedicate my time to 'real' writing, associating fanfic writing with something you threw aside when you 'outgrew' it, like dolls and cartoons. This proceeded for a long while, occasionally interrupted with school work and real life, and I had almost decided that I was done with fanfics for good._**

**_Then I heard someone scoffing about fanfics, noting them as a waste of writing talent and something to outgrow. It was like watching the new me slap the old me in the face. I was surprised to find myself defending my old hobby, remembering the late nights of frantic brainstorming and practice at adapting other characters into my style, the learning, the struggles to make convoluted reasons for plot holes and expanding on other, 'base' ideas. Others may have laughed at it as the attempts of someone who can't make up their own universe, but I realized that fanfiction is a part of me. For all the new characters and miniverses I've made up since I started, and all the smirking looks and attempts to act like a professional writer who listens to instrumentals and reads contemplative literature by Neil Gaiman, the truth is I AM a fangirl. I listen to Jpop and squee at yaoi pairings, and come up with grid maps of the starship Enterprise, not because I can't find a life. I found one, and it made me happy to be there, and I want to stay there. But I started here, and home is where the heart is. Call me childish if you want, but I'm doing what it took me too many months to realize I still love, and I don't think I'll be quitting until I finish each one of these projects. Things may be going slow (I've been getting a lot busier as of late), but they shall go._**

**_So, in short, I'm back, and I'm sorry I left you hanging. I hope you enjoyed this fic, and have a good day._**


End file.
